Oscar awarded actress Kate Winslet is one of the confirmed cast members of Avatar sequel. The latest update from set tell us that Winslet is spending a lot of time under water. Considering Winslet's career debut with James Cameron's Titanic, this is not a surprise. We can say that Winslet has an emotional connection with scenes including a lot of water. You might remember Winslet's unforgettable performance in Titanic had lots and lots of time in water.

Producer Jon Landau has recently attended to a Q&A session at the CinemaCon. Landau has shared some exclusive updates from the set of Avatar. Landau has opened up about the challenging underwater scenes they have encountered.

Landau explains:

“We built a water tank that was 500,000 gallons of water, and we are doing performance-capture under the water, on the surface of the water, and above the water. We trained our cast to free-breath-hold, because in the sequences they have to just be swimming, they can’t be on scuba, and they have to be able to do long takes. So we had a gentleman named Kirk Krack come in and train everybody that needed to be underwater how to go underwater and how to hold their breath. Kate Winslet had to train in this and she got up to a static breath hold of just about seven minutes. It’s amazing, it’s mind over matter. You see Kate going underwater and she just felt so comfortable. There was one day, we have a tank where she was just rehearsing and testing and we have some windows into it, and I go in there and she’s just walking on the bottom [of the tank] left and right, left and right, left and right, then she sees me in the window and she just waves. I couldn’t believe it!”

We did not have hard time believing in this statement as we are talking about an Oscar awarded actress here. Winslet is playing a character called Ronal in this upcoming Avatar sequel. Ronal, who is a free diver, belongs to the Metkaynina clan and most probably she is living under water.

Avatar 2 and Avatar 3 will be released in 2020 and 2021, consecutively. James Cameron has also reserved 2023 and 2024 for Avatar 4 and 5. The shooting of Avatar 2 has started last year. Producer Landau has shared updates from the set as well.

“We have completed our principal capture on ‘Avatar’ 2, 3, and part of 4. We’re going to do our live-action filming in New Zealand in the spring of this year. We just announced today that we’ve cast Edie Falco to play General Ardmore, who is the head of the RDA forces. In typical Jim [Cameron] fashion he finds this powerful woman to play what could be very easily a male role if people were just to read the script.”

“As we’ve moved on with the sequels to Avatar we made a very conscious decision to stage the whole four sequels on Pandora. We don’t need to go to another world if we want water, we’re going to go to the oceans of Pandora." Landau added.

Reading these has sparked our curiosity for the upcoming Avatar movies.

Avatar 2 opens December 18th, 2020; Avatar 3 on December 17th, 2021; Avatar 4 on December 20th, 2024; and Avatar 5 on December 19th, 2025.